


the adventures of hawkeye pierce (in color)

by subjectiveobjection



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, M/M, Multi, OT3, Past Relationship(s), ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-03 01:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19453351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subjectiveobjection/pseuds/subjectiveobjection
Summary: hawkeye pierce's life, starting from his draft notice.this does have a happy ending, but it's more of a "lived life well" ending than anything else.





	the adventures of hawkeye pierce (in color)

When Hawkeye Pierce is drafted, he goes out, gets hammered, and involves himself in a  _ menage a twelve. _ The next morning, he picks his shirt off a stranger’s floor (it reeks, so he grabs another, less pungent one) and hails a cab back home. He stumbles in and collapses, half on a chair, half on the dining table, and his father makes him eggs and coffee and neither of them say a word. The next day, when most of the alcohol has been flushed out of his system, he rants and raves and paces across the living room floor for fifty-seven minutes (his father times it). None of that reverses his marching orders.

When he steps foot in Korea for the first time, the first thing that hits him is the  _ noise. _ Even at the air base, he can hear explosions going off and artillery booming, and everyone there acts like it’s perfectly okay. It’s obviously  _ not _ okay, and he tells this to the kid who picks him up- a short, myopic guy with an uncanny penchant for predicting what Hawkeye’s gonna say and who can’t be more than twenty. On the way to the 4077th MASH, they see twenty-seven shells detonate, get shot at eleven times, and have to disembark and hide twice. By the time they arrive, Hawkeye has sweated through his Class A uniform, and the patches that aren’t damp are covered in mud and dirt.

He gets to know everyone at the unit, and he jokes and cracks wise and makes an ass of himself to everyone, and when his bunkie suggests building a still, he jumps at the chance. Hawkeye isn’t used to such vile shit, but as they tweak the knobs and tubes, his heart rate calms down somewhat for the first time in two days. (His heart gets right back to pounding out 140 beats per minute once they get shelled an hour later, but it’s nice while it lasts.)

The first time a kid dies on his table, he goes outside and empties the contents of his stomach onto the nice flowers that Father Mulcahy had just planted. Trapper comes out to check on him, and Hawkeye makes some half-assed crack about being in med school all over again. Hawkeye thanks his lucky stars that the kid who died was one of the last patients- he doesn’t have to face the OR until the next batch of wounded comes in, and Trapper stays with him, both of them leaning against the OR’s outside wall and not saying anything.

Drunken sex with Trapper, born out of a game of chicken, turns into not-so-drunken sex, and then not-so-drunken naked conversations. It’s nice. The first time it happens, Hawkeye wakes up, panicking just a little about Trapper’s wife. Turns out Trapper’s wife isn’t even in the realm of heterosexual. Hawkeye rests easy after that- as easy as one can rest when they’re queer, in a queer relationship, in the army.

Tommy Gillis dies on Hawkeye’s table and suddenly there isn’t any certainty anymore. Hawkeye is  _ supposed _ to be the best cutter in the bunch. He and Tommy were  _ supposed _ to live into old age together, meeting up every once in a while and taking the world by storm. Tommy was  _ supposed _ to live. “Look, all I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war. And rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is, doctors can't change rule number one,” Henry says to him, real emotion replacing the usual confounded dullness behind his eyes. Hawkeye wants nothing more than to elbow past Henry and make a break for it- steal a Jeep, drive to Kimpo, hop on a plane back to Crabapple Cove, where young men don’t die because half their internal organs get blown out.

Trapper gets an ulcer and he’s going to go home. In all his life, Hawkeye has never been torn like this- Trapper’s getting  _ out, _ he’s going  _ home, _ he’s leaving Hawkeye all alone in the war-torn hell that is Korea. They celebrate in more than a few ways, some of them army-sanctioned and some of them definitely not. And when the order comes in for Trapper to stay in Korea, Hawkeye wants to go down to Panmunjom and yell and shout at those  _ bastards, _ even though a small, hateful part of him is thanking God that Trapper is staying.

Hawkeye has lost almost all trust and faith in the government (not that he had much to begin with) when Henry gets his discharge papers. The damn army is doing something right for once, letting a decent man go home. Back to Bloomington, Illinois, where the only shooting that Henry will have to worry about is shooting craps. Hawkeye knows that Frank will take charge, and the thought is horrifying, but Henry’s going  _ home _ and he can’t bring himself to be too upset about Ferret Face. He kisses Henry on the (as usual) stubble-covered cheek, and they all wave goodbye, and when Radar comes into the OR he thinks that Henry has arrived home. (Turns out that you don’t stop worrying about shooting until you’ve set foot in the States.) Nowhere is safe, apparently. Hawkeye smashes a lot of glass items when he leaves OR, spewing profanities all the while, and Trapper silently joins him.

Trapper leaves without a note. Here one second, gone the next, like Tommy and Henry, except he’s not dead. Hawkeye searches high and low for any sort of note- after all, they were more than just friends, it makes sense that Trapper wouldn’t tell anyone of a note that could have damning information in it- and finds nothing. Everything glass that could’ve been broken has already been shattered. Hawkeye has always had his escape plan- Jeep, Kimpo, cargo plane,  _ home _ (or failing that, barbiturates), and he itches to get out of the damn place.

(He doesn’t know that when Trapper got his discharge papers, he resolutely refused to pack or write notes or do  _ anything _ to really solidify the fact that he was leaving until Hawkeye came back. He doesn’t know that by the time Trapper will finish editing his five-page letter to be approved by army censors, Hawkeye Pierce will have been declared dead, and Trapper will receive a letter in return informing him of said death. He doesn’t know that Trapper will descend into a haze of alcoholism for a month before being forced into rehab by his wife, that he will emerge and tell people to call him  _ John _ because  _ Trapper _ is connected to everything he’s lost.)

Hawkeye stays in place, though, even without that crucial information, because he has a duty. Not to capitalism, not to the government, not to America- he has a duty to Radar, Klinger, Ginger, everyone at the 4077th (minus Frank) and to every kid who comes through. He stays in place and keeps joking and cracking wise and making an ass of himself. He makes Frank’s life as miserable as possible, and when he picks up the fresh-faced young man at the airport, he’s determined to hate him. Then Hunnicutt catches the Kipling reference and gives Hawkeye a smile that in any other circumstance would be knee-weakening (in this one it just weakens Hawkeye’s resolve). He’s a great surgeon, too- steady under pressure (and being shot at and nearly blown up, all the while trying to fix kids who can’t be fixed, is a hell of a lot of pressure). They arrive back at the 4077th utterly sloshed, and when BJ insults Frank and collapses on Margaret’s legs within the first minute of being there, Hawkeye decides that BJ’s not that bad.

Regular army is a damning designation in Hawkeye’s book, and when he arrives, Sherman Potter lives up to the expectation. Yelling at Radar, yelling at Klinger,  _ how is this guy any better than Frank? _ When they’re called to OR and Radar tells Hawkeye that Potter’s been in administration for two years, the burning resentment in Hawkeye’s stomach flares.  _ How could they send him out here? _ “Margaret, if this guy’s a klutz, if he gets into any trouble, gimme a nudge. Or BJ.” Hawkeye’s got a good mind to drive down to Panmunjom and give them all a piece of his mind after the OR session is done (if he’s still conscious). But Potter holds up surprisingly well, and once he acclimates to the new unit, Hawkeye thinks the Colonel might turn out all right.

BJ is married- and not like Trapper is married- and Hawkeye hates the stupid part of his brain that notices every time BJ smiles or laughs or does  _ anything, _ really. Hawkeye stays quiet and tries to ignore his feelings and pretends like BJ’s laugh isn’t one of the best damn things he’s ever heard, and he thinks he can just about get through the war like this. And then he rolls his goddamn Jeep over, and suddenly BJ is touching him with the tenderness only used on patients and wives (Hawkeye is neither of those things- he’s a man, and he’s only got a tiny cut on his head), and he thinks he might just  _ explode. _ He hasn’t felt like this since Trapper left. How did he  _ do _ this last time? It’s torture. BJ dresses his wounds and nags him about drinking water (as if what they drink even qualifies as water), and every time he looks at Hawkeye, he looks for just a second too long. “Got something on your mind, soldier?” Hawkeye asks cheekily, trying not to betray everything that’s churning around in his brain. He’s always been thinking too much, too fast, and sometimes he hates it. In fact, he’s so entangled in his own mind that he doesn’t notice BJ coming closer until his lips are on Hawkeye’s, and then Hawkeye’s brain suddenly is devoid of all thought. When BJ pulls back, face anxious and hopeful, with a million questions in his eyes, it’s like Hawkeye’s mind starts back up again, this time with a million more worries than before. He stammers out something about Peg, how BJ is just throwing away his marriage for something unsafe, unstable- and when BJ tells him that Peg is okay with it, really,  _ “she said that if I don’t do something then she’s gonna come over here and kiss you herself,” _ Hawkeye takes just half a second to process it before pulling BJ to him again.

Margaret gets married and Frank goes crazy and a new guy with an enormous stick up his ass arrives. Hawkeye hates him at first- not like he hates Frank, because anyone with two brain cells can see that Frank is extremely flawed, but he hates Winchester because  _ he doesn’t get to pretend he’s the best cutter in the unit while he works at half the pace. _ Besides, there are quite a few areas that Hawkeye and BJ could sew circles around Winchester in, and they all know it. Hawkeye doesn’t realize that he’s warming to Charles until the other man puts on an intolerable, aggressively loud record and Hawkeye just feels annoyance, not the burning anger that comes so quickly nowadays.

Hawkeye doesn’t know why in the world he has sex with Margaret, but he does. They’re being shot at, they might die, and in every war picture, that’s what one is supposed to do. He knows that Margaret is grasping at straws, any reason to get out of her marriage. He wishes he’d said something to her before she’d gotten hitched, but she’d been so  _ happy. _ At the 8063rd, they snipe at each other worse than they had when they’d first arrived in Korea. When they head back to the 4077th, BJ looks at him-  _ he knows- _ and says nothing, but pulls him into a much-tighter-than-usual hug. There’s one bridge repaired, and he talks to Margaret- really talks to her, not just the usual sarcastic remarks- and repairs another, but Hawkeye can’t help but think that he’s lost something.  _ Grow up, _ he tells himself,  _ you’ve lost a lot since you got here. And you gained something from this little experience too. _

He makes a trip to Battalion Aid and decides to write a will, and there is nothing he can think of to leave BJ. BJ, who’s held him together more days than he’d care to admit. BJ, who’s made him come apart more nights than the army would like. Hawkeye thinks about leaving something to Peg, and he almost recoils. She slips passages to him into her letters to BJ, and he does the same for her, and leaving something to her would be almost as bad as leaving something to BJ.  _ Not Beej. Not Peg. So the only remaining Hunnicutt is Erin. _ Somehow, that seems  _ right _ to him. Erin Hunnicutt, part of the future, it’s only fitting that she have something of the past. (And if Hawkeye dies here and his will is executed, then the army mail service will ensure that whatever he leaves her  _ will _ be an object from the past.)

He’s murdered so many people- by sending them back up to the line to get killed, by sending them back up to  _ do _ the killing, by not saving them on his table- so why does the chicken put him over the edge?  _ It’s not a chicken, it’s a baby. _ “It was a  _ baby!” _ he cries. His breaths are coming quicker, and he can’t get air into his chest, and  _ oh, God, is this how the baby felt? _ “She smothered her own  _ baby!” _ She killed it. He killed it. He made her kill it. The baby is  _ dead, _ and he didn’t have to remember it, but Sidney decided to play God. “You son of a bitch.” He wants to bury the memory again, cover it in layers of booze and bad decisions and fake, happy recollections, ones where he didn’t kill a fucking  _ baby. _ He doesn’t want to remember it, and if occasionally driving a Jeep through walls is the price he has to pay, then by God, he’ll pay it. “Why did you make me remember that?” He’s ready to punch Sidney in the face, say one last  _ fuck you _ to pacifism (if Truman can do it, then why can’t he?), and then Sidney tells him that he’s halfway home, and he loses every bit of fight he’s ever had.

When he goes back to the 4077th (decidedly not Crabapple Cove) BJ is gone. There is no note. It’s painfully reminiscent of Trapper, but one of the things Hawkeye loves (should he think of BJ in the past tense?) about BJ is the sheer  _ devotion _ the man has- for his family, friends, every wounded soldier or Korean national that comes through.  _ I guess we weren’t as close as I thought. _ The notion tears at Hawkeye, rips through him like a bullet, but he’s accepted that he’s just not good enough to make people stay.

BJ comes back, and Hawkeye is even more torn than when Trapper got his ulcer- on the one hand, BJ should be playing with his daughter in the California surf and kissing his wife senseless, and on the other hand, he’s  _ here. _ After the party, BJ comes and finds him, and the second he opens his mouth, Hawkeye has forgiven him. He won’t- can’t- forget, but he can do the next best thing. BJ barely gets a word in edgewise before Hawkeye pulls him down into a kiss (he never really realized how much he missed kissing BJ) and when they pull apart, BJ seems like he knows everything Hawkeye wants to say. Hawkeye pats BJ’s face gently, then settles his hand on BJ’s cheek. He strokes the cheekbone with his thumb, determined to never forget the curve of BJ’s face or the slope of his jaw or even the way his goddamned mustache hangs just a bit over his lip because he can’t be arsed to trim it regularly. Hawkeye broaches the subject- they’re not going to see each other after the war, most likely, so what are they going to  _ do?- _ and BJ pulls back, his eyes wide and vulnerable. Hawkeye is tired- too tired to have this discussion, too tired to deal with the whole host of issues it entails, both moral and practical. He steers the topic away, asking BJ about how he’s going to get the bright yellow motorbike from here to the States, and BJ seems happy to shift. That’s all Hawkeye can do, anyways- wring what little happiness he can from the situation they’ve got.

The chopper takes off and Hawkeye sees the note. His vision blurs as tears fill his eyes, and he can barely see BJ ride his bike (very dangerously) down the hill. The 4077th is gone, and they’ve all taken little pieces of his heart with them. The war may have taken parts of his soul, but the 4077th has his heart.

Maine is not as Hawkeye left it. His father, who still had a mane that trended towards black when Hawkeye was drafted, now has thin white hair, and more wrinkles than Hawkeye remembers.  _ It was only three years, _ he wants to say,  _ so why do you look like it’s been a decade? _ His dad tears up when Hawkeye hugs him, and Hawkeye is suddenly aware of how thin his father’s gotten. The highway is bumpier than Hawkeye recalls, and when he opens the car door and steps out in front of the house, the paint has faded and the wind chimes are gone. The air is the same, though, and Hawkeye breathes in huge lungfuls of sweet, grime-free Maine oxygen. He traipses in, bags in hand, and he’s struck with an overwhelming wave of affection for the place. He wants to hug everything, including the couch that they still haven’t gotten rid of after their old cat had pissed on it. He settles for hugging his dad again, and he holds on for five minutes (his father times it).

Daniel Pierce passes away in the middle of the night from a heart attack at age sixty-seven, three years after the war, when Hawkeye is barely thirty-two. Hawkeye has seen that type of heart attack, he knows it’s painless, he knows that it’s hard to stop, and yet he still can’t stop thinking that he could’ve done something more. Him being gone for three years probably didn’t help his father’s blood pressure. The funeral is quiet, even though half the town shows up, and when it ends, Hawkeye has enough casserole to last him a year. Tommy and Henry and thousands of soldiers and now his dad have all “crossed over” or “moved on” or whatever other bullshit term used as a placeholder. He goes home from the funeral and cries for the first time after his dad’s death as he writes his bi-weekly letter to BJ and Peg (it’s two days early, but he’s sure they won’t mind). He’s pretty sure that a few of his tears hit the paper, but BJ has seen him in far worse states. The house suddenly seems much too empty, and he thinks he knows how his dad felt when he was gone. (Who is he kidding? At least he knows that his father is dead, instead of waiting for a phone call or a telegram with words spelling out the unspeakable.)

And then two weeks later, as Hawkeye is starting to remember not to put out two plates for dinner, there’s a knock on the front door. He scrubs at his face and takes a breath, because he just  _ cannot _ deal with another person with another casserole (honestly, he thinks he’ll throw it in their face), and he opens the door. “You brought pie,” Hawkeye says, after a stunned pause.

BJ smiles softly on the other side of the doorway  _ (since when has he had a full beard?), _ and Peg holds out the pie to him. “I’ve gotten a lot better at cooking since the war,” she tells him.

“I mean, with the amount this guy eats, I bet you’ve had lots of practice,” Hawkeye says.

BJ lets out a subdued laugh. “Can we come in?”

_ It’s gonna be okay, _ Hawkeye thinks, believing it for the first time since his dad’s heart attack.  _ It really  _ is _ gonna be okay. _ “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says. “Don’t- you don’t need to ask that.”

When Hawkeye Pierce dies, it’s from the same sort of heart attack that his father experienced. He is eighty-nine years old, and the last thing he thinks is that he’ll see BJ again. He knows that Erin will be there to take care of her mother, and he hopes that Peggy will take a few years to get to wherever they’re going. (She will, and when the last of Erin’s parents die, she and her wife will spend all night sitting at their graves. But Hawkeye doesn’t know that- he just hopes it’ll turn out to be something along those lines.) Half of Mill Valley turn up for his funeral, and half of Crabapple Cove come, too- along with a certain Trapper John McIntyre (whose pain upon hearing the nickname abruptly stopped with the discovery of the army’s cock-up), Radar O’Reilly (who has grown exactly 0 feet and 0 inches, despite Hawkeye’s promises to ‘make him tall’), Charles Emerson Winchester III (who bitched and moaned when he was forced to retire before Hawkeye- contrary to popular belief, there  _ are _ downsides to working at a large, heavily bureaucratic hospital), Maxwell Q. Klinger (whose sewing business is now staffed by a host of younger Klingers), and Margaret Houlihan-Winchester (along with her wife, Honoria Winchester-Houlihan), among others. He is mourned for a bit, and then he is celebrated, and when Erin’s memorial still blows up, she remembers the story her Grandpa Potter told her about his Purple Heart and laughs. She knows her dad would've laughed too.

**Author's Note:**

> tysm for reading! you have no idea how many times i had to stop myself from rhyming "maine" and "plane." comments/kudos always appreciated :)))


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